This is a great book exploring the intersection of ecological concerns and contemporary theology. The author basically argues that a strong view of the Incarnation provides a firm basis for ecological concern.

Theology begins with and is evaluated on the basis of the cross. All thought about God, philosophy, psychology, politics must begin with the cross or be misdirected. It is in the event of the gruesome cross, unpampered and unhidden by flowers that we see the god-forsaken God suffering and dying. In this event the Triune God is defined: not as all powerful pharaoh or caesar apathetic and unable to feel pain (and thus love) but one who emptied Himself and took on our abandonment - a God who is love. In so doing the cross secondly tells us about our solution. The cure for humanity is not in becoming divine but seeing ourselves as who we are: abandoned, godforsaken, thus one with Him who cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" As a result to rise with Him to new life and reach the fullness of our humanity. A fullness expressed in liberation from the legalism of the law which penetrates all the dimensions of our life including the pyschological and political. Specifically to bring God's future now beginning in Jesus (the Kingdom expressed as freedom) into our present reality by granting liberty to the oppressed.

Moltmann wrote the Crucified God (1974, English translation) in reaction to certain (specifically N. American) misunderstandings of his earlier work, Theology of Hope (1965). Moltmann's chief concern in The Crucified God was to rescue the hope of the resurrection from any confusion with the officially optimistic culture of modern capitalist society. He does this by reminding his audience that it is only the one who is "unsuccessful" and who suffers with the victims of so-called "success" and "power" that is raised by God at the end. Moltmann's treatment of the cross, therefore, is a plea for Christians to enter into the suffering that God has already entered into, and not remain passive or complacent as outside, "objective" (i.e., apathetic) observers of the human condition. If God does not remain above the plane of history dispassionately observing the suffering of the Son on the cross, but is radically "in Christ," involved in and affected by that suffering (God loses an only child!), then we too (as followers of God) must enter into the suffering of our victims (Holocaust, Third World poverty, etc.). In this respect, the cross becomes the critique ALL utopian dreams (socialist, capitalist, facist alike). Resurrection hope is hope for the hopeless, for the crucified ones of this world.

Moltmann has not only boldly reformulated Luther's "Theology of the Cross," but has, in the process, also made an enduring contribution to Political and Liberation Theology.

THE CRUCIFIED GOD brings the question of "Who is God in the cross of Christ who is abandonned by God?" to the center of Christian theology in the 21st century. It is a complex exposition of historical interpretations of the Crucifixion and posits an active God who came into the world in man's historical time through the incarnation and continues to dwell with man and his sufferings in our present historical time. For Moltmann man's time is God's time and vice versa. Moltmann sees hope for the concern of mankind turning toward suffering man through a modern understanding of the Crucifixion and Resurrection taken as a reality of our contemporary lives. The communal shared remembrance of the Crucifixion gives way to communal shared hope of the Resurrection in the acknowledgement of personal responsability in the sufferings of mankind. Moltmann is sensitive to the need to recapture the Judaic background of Christianity in modern Christian theology and offers an interesting perspective on this subject.